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January 13, 2013

[While a horrific gang
rape in New Delhi has transfixed India and
drawn attention to a violent epidemic, rape is just one facet of a broad range
of violence and discrimination that leads to the deaths of almost two million
women a year, researchers say. Among the causes are not only sexual violence
but also domestic violence, family disputes and female infanticide, as well as
infant neglect and poor care of the elderly that affect girls and women far
more than boys and men.]

Riders
struggled to enter a women-only compartment of a train in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Women in New Delhi and throughout India say that their gender makes

them
vulnerable to attack.

NEW DELHI — Harassed for
years by her husband and his relatives, an Indian woman was finally kidnapped,
raped, strangled and tossed into a ditch.

For more than a year,
the woman’s father has tried without success to get the police to arrest those
accused of killing her, including her husband, who were charged but remain at
large. The father, Subedar Akhileshar Kumar Singh, an army officer, says he
believes his daughter was killed because her in-laws were not satisfied with
her dowry, according to an article on
Thursday in The Indian Express.

Such crimes are routine
in this country, where researchers estimate that anywhere from 25,000 to
100,000 women a year are killed over dowry disputes. Many are burned alive in a
particularly grisly form of retribution.

While a horrific gang
rape in New Delhi has transfixed India and
drawn attention to a violent epidemic, rape is just one facet of a broad range
of violence and discrimination that leads to the deaths of almost two million
women a year, researchers say. Among the causes are not only sexual violence
but also domestic violence, family disputes and female infanticide, as well as
infant neglect and poor care of the elderly that affect girls and women far
more than boys and men.

Women have made enormous
strides in India in recent decades. Their schooling now matches that of men,
and they have moved forcefully into many industries, although their
participation in the work force is still far less than that of men. And women
have become leaders in Indian politics.

But women in New Delhi
and throughout India say that their gender makes them vulnerable to attack from
a vast and growing sea of unattached and unemployed young men who view women’s
success as the reason for their failure.

“Women are breaking
through and advancing toward greater attainment — but in a society that
continues to be patriarchal, that is increasing tensions,” said Dr. K. Srinath
Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “And one of
the manifestations of that tension is increased violence against women.”

In a column in
The Hindustan Times, Sagarika Ghose, an author and commentator, wrote, “A
profound fear and a deep, almost pathological, hatred of the woman who aspires
to be anything more than mother and wife is justified on the grounds of
tradition.”

That tradition has for
centuries been especially deadly for women who fail to live up to its ideals or
reject them altogether. Using techniques pioneered by Amartya Sen, an
economist who won the Nobel
Prize in 1998, researchers estimate that there are as many as
100 million “missing women,” as Mr. Sen called them, in India. These are women
who would be alive if they died at the same rates relative to men as
woman die relative to men in more developed countries, and their ranks grow by
nearly two million each year, studies by an American and Canadian
research team concluded.

Some of these lives are
ended before they begin: Indian women are far more likely to abort female
fetuses than male ones. Still, such birth selection accounts for, at most, 12
percent of the figure, the researchers found.

The official explanation
for many of the deaths of “missing women” is that they died from accidents or
injuries, but there is little reason to believe that Indians are especially
clumsy or accident-prone, the researchers said. Instead, they believe that in
many cases the official explanations mask deadly crimes.

“Our guess is that a lot
of these deaths are due to the dowry phenomenon, but it just doesn’t get
reported that way,” said Siwan Anderson, an associate professor of economics at
the University of British Columbia and an author of the studies.

As many as 100,000 women
are burned to death each year and another 125,000 die from violent injuries
that are rarely reported as killings, according to government figures and other
data analyzed by the research team.

Beyond violence, Indian
girls may suffer from subtle neglect that can have profound consequences.
Research has found, for instance, that Indian mothers tend to breast-feed boys
longer than they do girls, Ms. Anderson said. And once their sons start eating
solid food, they may get more of it than their daughters. Families may also
invest more in the protection of boys’ health, buying them mosquito netting to
ward off malaria and dengue.

These differences in
nutrition and care may account for the substantially greater share of girls
under the age of 4 who die of infectious and respiratory diseases in India than
elsewhere, the researchers found.

Deaths in childbirth,
long considered a plague here, account for the fatalities of about 130,000
Indian women a year. An even greater number results from an increased relative
risk of heart attacks, which may demonstrate that the poorer quality of care
provided to women continues throughout their lives.

As girls age, the strict
controls that many families have over their daughters cannot protect them from
rape and sexual assault, since most of those crimes are committed by people
known to the women, studies say. But even so, such controls have some benefits,
public health experts say. Indian women have, on average, no more than two
sexual partners in their entire lives, and most are virgins when they marry,
surveys show. This absence of promiscuity is probably an important reason that
AIDS never became an epidemic in India.

“Tradition in this case
is not a bad thing,” said K. Sujatha Rao, a former health secretary of
India and a crucial figure in the fight against AIDS. “You take marriage here
as a much more sacrosanct thing.”

Trying to determine how
to protect women in India while preserving the country’s traditions has led to
a very public debate in recent weeks.

Asaram Bapu, a popular Hindu guru, said that
the New Delhi rape victim could have saved herself if she had simply “held the
hand of one of the men and said, ‘I consider you as my brother.’ ” Some
conservative politicians and commentators blamed skirts, revealing clothing, a
lack of overcoats on girls, junk food, astrology and the decisions by some
wives to work outside the home.

For many Indian women,
having more police officers on the streets is no answer, since many view them
as every bit as dangerous to their safety as criminals. On Thursday, the police
in South Delhi put up posters advising young women to go straight home after
their classes in school or college.

Tradition in India also
results in considerable acceptance of violence. A 2005 government survey found that 54
percent of women in India said that husbands were justified in beating their
wives, with the most common justification being if they failed to show proper
respect for their in-laws.

Still, Indian husbands
beat their wives far less than men in many other developing countries,
according to comparable surveys done in multiple
countries. Domestic violence levels are far higher in Colombia, Egypt, Peru and
Zambia than in India, the surveys found.

But discrimination
against women is so endemic and wide-ranging in India that deaths from domestic
violence account for only a fraction of the overall risk of unnecessary death.
“Other aspects come into play, like female infanticide, mistreatment of young
girls in terms of access to resources, maternal deaths, unequal access to
health care and so forth,” said Ms. Anderson, the economics professor. “Indian
women face more dangers.”